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"DES MOINES, Iowa - Snow was piled so high in Iowa that drivers couldn't see across intersections and a North Dakota snowblower repair shop was overwhelmed with business as heavy snow and wind chills as low as 52 below zero blasted much of the Midwest on Thursday. Frigid weather also gripped the South, where a rare cold snap was expected to bring snow and ice Thursday to states from South Carolina to Louisiana. Forecasters said wind chills could drop to near zero at night in some areas. In Bowbells, in northwestern North Dakota, the wind chill hit 52-below zero Thursday morning. "The air freezes your nostrils, your eyes water and your chest burns from breathing - and that's just going from the house to your vehicle," said Jane Tetrault, the Burke County deputy auditor. Her vehicle started, but the tires were frozen. "It was bump, bump, bump all the way to work with the flat spots on my tires," Tetrault said. "It was a pretty rough ride." Other parts of the Midwest also had dangerously cold wind chills, including negative 40 in parts of South Dakota and minus 27 in northeast Nebraska, according to the National Weather Service. Equally disturbing chills were expected overnight Friday."

"On Christmas Day, a Nigerian-born terrorist named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger airplane. Only the bravery of a fellow passenger prevented the catastrophe. President Obama called the terror attempt a "systemic failure" on the part of American national security agencies. In particular, he blamed the CIA for the foul-up. There is no doubt that the CIA should have done something more to prevent this attack. But, then again, President Obama has been keeping them busy-with global warming. Seriously. According to the New York Times on Jan. 5, just a few days after Obama excoriated the CIA publicly, "The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets-including spy satellites and other classified sensors-to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change." This project, the Times reported, "has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends …" While missing a potentially catastrophic terror attack is problematic, it's good to know that we've got the inside dossier on the mating habits of polar bears. This isn't a shock coming from the "watermelon" Obama White House-green on the outside, red on the inside. The simple truth is that the Obama administration believes that the solution to global warming is the same as the solution to terrorism: Marxist-style global redistributionism."

"The snow is expected to start falling during the late afternoon in the South East and get very heavy by the evening. With Arctic temperatures affecting the whole of the country the National Grid was forced to issue an alert for just the SECOND time in history. The National Grid warned power suppliers to use less gas after seeing a 30 per cent rise on normal seasonal demand during the cold snap. But Prime Minister Gordon Brown today denied the country was facing a gas supply crisis. During a visit to the London Gateway port construction site, near Thurrock, Essex, the PM said: "I think Britain can deal with these problems. "There are always difficulties when we have a long spell of bad weather. But we can cope." "